1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to supporting communication among users. More particularly, the present invention relates to selecting a communication means to be used in the communication.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, natural-language processing including machine translation, speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis have been developed and have been put to practical use. Meanwhile, with the widespread use of communication networks such as the Internet, people all over the world have come to perform communication in various forms. For example, in addition to communication by use of text data such as an e-mail or a chat, communication by use of speech data through VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is performed.
Refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2001-321571 as an example of the background art related to virtual space.
Attempts to constructing a virtual world on the Internet have expanded in recent years. For example, a user operates an avatar that is a character representing the user in the world. The avatar is displayed on a screen as a three-dimensional image, for example. Avatars that are characters representing different users are also displayed on the screen. Here, a user can start communication with a different user in text or speech when the avatar of the user approaches the avatar of the different user.
However, because the appearance of an avatar is different from the appearance of a user of the avatar him/herself, it is difficult to know the nationality, residence or personality of an avatar from the appearance thereof. If a user wants to talk to an avatar, for example, it is difficult to know what language the avatar can speak. It is even more difficult to know whether or not communication with the avatar is possible by use of a machine translation technique and, if possible, what translation technique is appropriate for the communication. For this reason, the user may hesitate to start the communication in order to establish communication in some cases.